I'm making this post in light of a recent post on the Holiday Complaints forum about a holiday the OP thinks they were miss-sold a Sandals holiday in Cuba

http://www.holidaytruths.co.uk/forum/miss-sold-holiday-cuba-t159508.html

and I hope that others in the future might find the following helpful.

The key thing to remember when booking ALL hotels in Cuba is that regardless of the name that is used for marketing purposes, the hotels are not owned outright by the 'headline' hotel chain. For example, Sol Melia do not own outright any of the hotels that are marketed to European tourists as Sol Melia hotels because the Cuban Government retains a minimum 51% stake in the joint venture company that does own them.

To complicate issues further there are situations where the Government owns a 100% stake in the hotel (ie it is owned by one of the Government companies such as Cubanacan, Gran Caribe etc) but they then contract a non-Cuban hotel chain or holiday company to manage it on their behalf. This means that if you book well in advance there is always the chance that the management contract will be changed between you booking the holiday and you actually going there. In those circumstances it is not always clear whose responsibility it is to notify you of this change. Should it be the outgoing management company? Depending on why they are not still contracted to manage the hotel, they might not want to tell you (and might indeed be subject to a gagging clause enforced by the Cuban Government) and after all for most tourists on a package holiday, your contract is with the TO not the hotel. Should it be the incoming management company? Perhaps, but again your contract probably isn't with them either for the same reason and if they think that knowing this might make you want to change your booking then they have a vested interest in not telling you either. Which leaves the TO who is still offering the package and/or the TA who sold it to you but whether this constitutes a 'major change' to your holiday could be debatable.

Yes, one would expect to be notified of such a change but this is Cuba and things are rarely as clear cut as to who has the responsibility of notifying you and I could imagine that the TAs are reliant on the TOs telling them in the first place. And they are in turn reliant on one or other of the Cuban Government, the outgoing management company and/or the incoming management company telling them of this change. I have no idea who does have the legal obligation to tell you and my reason for posting this here is to forewarn people that I think that there is a greater danger of this happening in Cuba than elsewhere, rather than to advise people what to do when it happens. Hence why I am posting here and not in reply to the OP with the complaint.

Regulars on HT will know that I am a huge fan of Cuba and would never want to discourage anybody from visiting. In fact the exact opposite - go now while it is different to anywhere else in the region, it won't remain this way for long. However, anybody booking does need to know that it is different, both as a place to visit and in the way the tourist industry is owned and managed. As with anywhere, some of the hotels are superb and can hold their place with any hotels in the Caribbean region but others are pretty dire and simply not comparable to what you would expect of a similarly rated hotel in the Mediterranean region. This is why it is absolutely vital to do your research in advance of booking.

The one thing to remember is that if you book a holiday in Cuba your hotel will not be 100% owned by the non-Cuban company whose logo appears on the documentation or in brochures etc. If it is very important to you that you stay in a hotel owned and run by a specific company eg Sandals, as it was for the OP in the Holiday Complaints forum about the holiday they feel was miss-sold to them, then Cuba is probably not the place to book your holiday. More often than not you won't notice the difference but you cannot rely on this in every situation.

SM